Tag Archives: watch

Time can be calculated using the azimuth of the sun (aka solar time). Based on this idea, Tinkerman has built an unusual project called Solr. The concept is to translate the position of the sun into time presented on a vintage display. This new digital watch is freak enough to work only with a battery and the sun. The battery is needed to power the electronic parts and the sun is needed to calibrate the shadow of a screw with a reference line to calculate the time digitally using a digital compass.

The PCB has a white line and all you have to do is to align the shadow of the screw to it. The science behind this project rely on the fact that a change of 1 degree in longitude equals to 4 minutes. So, as the day is passing the orientation you need to follow to make the shadow align with the white line increases and therefore the time can be calculated. HMC5883L ( 3-axis digital magnetometer) is used to determine the orientation. This chunk of code in Solr’s repo makes the method used to calculate the time very clear.

The firmware (written in Arduino C) behind this project has three main tasks:

Calibrating the HMC5883L, and the calibration procedure is explained in the HMC5883L datasheet.

This project aims to build a thin, flexible smartwatch. It’s wrap-around display and touchscreen will allow it to display more data at a glance than current devices. Besides telling time and displaying notifications, the watch will feature pulse rate, blood oxygen, and step sensors for health monitoring.

This is the third in my series of minimalist watches based on the ATtiny85. This version displays the time by drawing an analogue watch face on a miniature 64×48 OLED display. It uses a separate crystal-controlled low-power RTC chip to keep time to within a few seconds a month, and puts the processor and display to sleep when not showing the time to give a battery life of over a year.

David Johnson-Davies designed a minimalist ATtiny85-based watch using 12 LEDs, arranged like a clock face, to show the time in analogue-style. He writes:

To show the time you press the button on the watch face, and the time is then displayed for four seconds. It lights one LED to show the hour, and flashes another LED to show the minutes to the nearest five minutes, like the hour and minute hands on a clock. If only one LED lights up you know that both hands are pointing to the same hour mark.

Max.K @ hackaday.io designed his own impressive watch based on Atmega328p with Arduino bootloader, Maxim DS3231 (<2min per year deviation), 96×96 pixel Sharp Memory LCD (LS013B4DN04) and it’s powered by a CR2025 160mAh coin cell battery.

Chronio is an Arduino-based 3D-printed Watch. By not including fancy Wifi and BLE connectivity, it gets several months of run time out of a 160mAh button cell. The display is an always-on 96×96 pixel Sharp Memory LCD. If telling the time is not enough, you can play a simplified version of Flappy Bird on it.

Have an old cell phone laying around? Don’t know what to do with it? What if I told you that you could turn that old cell phone into a smartwatch!

What I’d like to do for this crazy/ambitions project is turn an old cell phone into a smartwatch. So obviously an old cell phone is required. The primary reason for this project is simply that I had an old cell phone laying around and wanted to find a creative way to repurpose it. The one I had is a Nokia 1100, but most other old cell phones would work, so long as you can find the schematics for the LCD online

Nick Lee managed to install Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. The process was not straightforward but he succeed after a few tweaks to the WatchKit app. The Apple Watch take about an hour to boot Windows 95 due to the reason that it’s an emulated version and not a virtualized one. Apple Watch runs it’s processor at 520 MHz, has 512 MB RAM and 8 GB of internal storage.

This is a great ATtiny85 watch that uses a SSD1306 OLED display and is powered by a CR1220 battery.

Today core subject, ATtiny85. Someone suggest me to use SOIC version to reduce the watch size and I found the coin cell mAh calculation method will count the battery voltage down to 2.0 V, so this watch require a low voltage version MCU to keep it stable. So I have ordered an ATTINY85V-10SU. (much expensive $_$)

One of the main inspirations for this project was Jared Sanson’s implementation of a DIY smartwatch (REF 0). With several design iterations, he was able to produce a watch in a very small package that can communicate with a PC via USB HID, features an OLED display, and has support for an accelerometer. As my project was to be completed in the span of a mere month, several of the components I got were purchased for their ease of use rather than their compactness.

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